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December 23, 2011, 5:10 am UTC

Hardly there will be any serious marketing plan where email marketing do not feature in. From a small single-owned business to a large company, every one considers email marketing except those marketers who have already tried it and failed at getting any valuable result from it. They left the ship even without knowing what went wrong and what they could have done differently to turn their email marketing campaign from an absolute fiasco to an Academy award winning blockbuster – well, I know it is a bit of exaggeration, but you got the point. Right?

5 steps to a better email marketing campaign

One of the mistakes a marketer commits when creating an email campaign is to test different elements before incorporating them in the final mail that he or she sends out. But the good news studies have been done into that and it was found that tweaking some of the items of an email can increase conversion. I am putting that down below.

Step 1: Tweak the subject line

Before you click send you should ask yourself if the subject line of your email message is powerful enough to make people to open it. You should check the length of the subject line, placement of words, and nature of words used in the subject. Make the subject powerful by using action words and actionable by infusing urgency.

Step 2: Tweak the message

There are five aspects of an email body: greeting, opening paragraph, closing paragraph, theme, tone and mood. When creating an email message, you should be careful about these things. One way to do this is to create a profile of an ideal reader and tweak these to suit its taste buds.

Step 3: Think through the layout and image

Content is very important. That is why we have put it before the design, but design is no less important in deciding the conversion rate. Your design should match the expectations of the reader for him to trust you and read the message you sent. An email designed for teenager should not be sent to a 40+ individual. He may get put off by that. You should match the design with the ideal customer profile.

Step 4: Tweak call to action

This looks too obvious to be overlooked, but the astonishing fact is that most of the mailers sent out do not have any defined call to action line or button, and some of them have more than one, which confuse the readers. Neither of the situations is desirable. Before sending a mailer out you should ask yourself and brainstorm with your team to find the one action you would want your readers to take. Include that “one action” in your mail body.

Step 5: timing

If you do not time your mail delivery well, your mail will certainly go unopened, despite every other thing being right. Call a meeting and brainstorm to understand a day in your recipients’ life. You should also look at what your competitors are doing to get a sense of it. Time your email delivery accordingly.

There are several other factors that email marketers measures and tweak, but those items are little less important than these. If you get these five things write, your conversion rate will shoot up. It may not bring you success like Titanic and Avatar did to Steven Spielberg, but it definitely will boost your conversion.